The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle Journal of Creative Writing Sigma Tau Delta International English Honor Society Volume 87, 2012 Editor of Publications: Karlyn Crowley Associate Editors: Gretchen Panzer Hannah Schmitt Production Editors: Kristen Kutil Gretchen Panzer St. Norbert College De Pere, Wisconsin Honor Members of Sigma Tau Delta Chris Abani Katja Esson Marion Montgomery Kim Addonizio Mari Evans Kyoko Mori Edward Albee Philip José Farmer Scott Morris Julia Alvarez Robert Flynn Azar Nafisi Rudolfo A. Anaya Shelby Foote Howard Nemerov Saul Bellow H.E. Francis Naomi Shihab Nye John Berendt Alexandra Fuller Sharon Olds Robert Bly Neil Gaiman Walter J. Ong, S.J. Vance Bourjaily Charles Ghigna Suzan-Lori Parks Cleanth Brooks Nikki Giovanni Laurence Perrine Gwendolyn Brooks Donald Hall Michael Perry Lorene Cary Robert Hass David Rakoff Judith Ortiz Cofer Frank Herbert Henry Regnery Henri Cole Peter Hessler Richard Rodriguez Billy Collins Andrew Hudgins Kay Ryan Pat Conroy William Bradford Huie Mark Salzman Bernard Cooper E. Nelson James Sir Stephen Spender Judith Crist X.J. Kennedy William Stafford Jim Daniels Jamaica Kincaid Lucien Stryk James Dickey Ted Kooser Amy Tan Mark Doty Li-Young Lee Sarah Vowell Ellen Douglas Valerie Martin Eudora Welty Richard Eberhart David McCullough Jessamyn West Dave Eggers Erin McGraw Jacqueline Woodson New Honor Members in italics Delta Award Recipients Richard Cloyed Elizabeth Holtze Elva Bell McLin Beth DeMeo Elaine Hughes Isabel Sparks Bob Halli E. Nelson James Sue Yost Copyright © 2012 by Sigma Tau Delta All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Sigma Tau Delta, Inc., the International English Honor Society, William C. Johnson, Executive Director, Department of English, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, Illinois 60115-2863, U.S.A. The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle is published annually in April with the continuing generous assistance of Northern Illinois University (DeKalb, IL) and St. Norbert College (De Pere, WI). Publication is limited to members of Sigma Tau Delta. Members are entitled to a one-year subscription upon payment of the initial fee. The subsequent annual subscription rate is ten dollars (U.S.). Sigma Tau Delta is a member of the Association of College Honor Societies. 2011–2012 Writing Awards for The Sigma Tau Delta Review and The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle Judson Q. Owen Award for Best Piece Overall Wil Norton “The Collective Unconscious, Zen Buddhism, and Zeami’s Atsumori: Aesthetics as a Means of Transcending the Self” Frederic Fadner Critical Essay Award Wil Norton “The Collective Unconscious, Zen Buddhism, and Zeami’s Atsumori: Aesthetics as a Means of Transcending the Self” Eleanor B. North Poetry Award Ainsley Kelly “Firestorm” Herbert Hughes Short Story Award Sarah Tarkany “One Hundred” Elizabeth Holtze Creative Nonfiction Award Margaret O’Brien “Sweet Water” Judge for Writing Awards SUZANNE BERNE is the author of three novels and a book of nonfiction. Her first novel, A Crime in the Neighborhood (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill) won Great Britain’s Orange Prize, awarded annually to the best book of fiction by a woman published in the UK. It was also a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award, and it was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, as was her second novel, A Perfect Arrangement. Her third novel, The Ghost at the Table, was named one of the best books of the year by the Boston Globe and was featured on NPR’s The Diane Rehm Show. Her short stories, reviews, and essays have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Vogue, The New York Times, Allure, The Washington Post, Mademoiselle, Ploughshares, The London Sunday Times, and Agni. Berne has taught at Harvard University, the Radcliffe Institute, and Wellesley College. Currently she teaches creative writing at Boston College and is on the faculty of the Ranier Writing Workshop in Tacoma, Washington. Her most recent book is Missing Lucile, a biography of her paternal grandmother. Contents The Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, Volume 87, 2012 Poetry Firestorm 9 Ainsley Kelly Eleanor B. North Poetry Award Revolution 11 Ainsley Kelly Mariner 13 Mary Katherine Foster sunday service 14 Alexa Johnson bonding 15 Alexa Johnson Lost or Discarded 16 John Watkins Posed Photo from a Christmas Morning 17 Hannah Ross Roadside Funeral 18 Evanne Lindley Marbles for Madness 20 Adam Brown Putting Up Corn 21 Catherine Pritchard Childress Small Lives 23 Amanda Blythe Waiting 26 Samantha Killmeyer Doing the Laundry 27 Samantha Killmeyer Black Milk 29 Matt Baker Muscadine 30 Hanna Allen US-74 W 32 Hanna Allen The Last Time I Went to Church 34 Meg Lindsay If Penelope’s Mother Had Been There 36 Jennifer Weber Creative Non-Fiction Sweet Water 38 Margaret O’Brien Elizabeth Holtze Creative Nonfiction Award An Accent on Moving 45 Wietske Maria Smeele The Isolated Islands 49 Kaelin Holland Montezuma’s Revenge, Coca-Cola Salvation, 54 and a Mexican Graveyard David Guyott Abandoned Horizon 57 Kelly Cernetich Trigger Happy 62 Jacqueline Sheppard Orange Geyser 68 Maria E. Taylor This is the House the Munsters Built 70 Jacqueline Fetzer Ashes and Ghosts 74 Michael Carpenter Short Fiction One Hundred 79 Sarah Tarkany Herbert Hughes Short Story Award You Discover One Long Weekend That Japanese 86 Antacids Are Not As Strong As Ours Cody Greene Deeper Still 93 Taylor Madaffari Displaced 106 Stefanie Mauro The Contracting of a Womb and Long-Distance Goats 110 Christina Seymour Just Let It Rest 117 Melissa Miller The Hotel Franklin 124 Neilee Wood The Third Saturday in October 132 Will Lewis Extinguishing a Memory 138 Erin McChristian Just The One 145 Kendra Kravig Poetry Firestorm Revolution Mariner sunday service bonding Lost or Discarded Posed Photo from a Christmas Morning Roadside Funeral Marbles for Madness Putting Up Corn Small Lives Waiting Doing the Laundry Black Milk Muscadine US-74 W The Last Time I Went to Church If Penelope’s Mother Had Been There 9 Firestorm Ainsley Kelly By the end of August, even the chaparral has dried out and died in the faulted canyons. One October Santa Anna, we woke to ash falling from an orange sky. Any form of friction can cause a spark. The fires moved faster than a car can drive; they passed within a mile on either side of Summer’s Past Farm where we bought our flowers. Air quality: poor heavy particulate, said the radio. We ran outside to catch leaf skeletons, falling in flakes, stemmed grey veins, carried fifty miles from the mountains by the wind, dissolved when they touched our palms. Some things fall down to us: bulbs transplanted from a lost ranch, a silver ladle, wallet of an uncle who died at seventeen. We trooped inside coughing, leaving cinder footprints on the Chinese rug, soiling the gift my grandmother saved from her mother’s disgust. In the backcountry the root systems of great oaks smoldered for months. Ash coated the pool with film, gathered in gutters. Name the dead 10 you inherited at birth. After the fires, they found the animals: fox, deer, coyote, mountain lion, rabbit, charred carcasses grouped together in a hollow. Miles of blackened dirt along the interstate, children catching ashes, and, finally, in December, half an inch of rain. 11 Revolution Ainsley Kelly So my mother sat in her room reading ancient mythology, classical music streaming thinly up from the record player and out the window while, below in the quad, the other women were burning their bras. She finished her education in half the time that I will. Breaking only when the record stopped to share a cup of tea with the engineer across the hall. Until he told her his plan: that she should wait on him always. 12 This was the story I always asked for because I knew she didn’t hesitate just coolly walked to the window and dropped the teacup out— tea boiled in the air— and something shattered in the quad below. Ainsley Kelly is a senior English major and Religious Studies minor at Santa Clara University. She is currently working on a poetry manuscript as a senior project, with the help of a Canterbury Fellowship from her university’s English Department. Ainsley was awarded the Shipsey Poetry Prize in 2010 and the Academy of American Poets/Tamera Verga Prize in 2011. She is the poetry editor of the Santa Clara Review. 13 Mariner Mary Katherine Foster —an erasure to Odysseas Elytis In the constant reversal of the world, everything is sheet-metal, screws, and flotation devices— full miracles and danger sharing the same body. The house near the senses, lit and solitary, renders our reality linear, and a flash of birds from the sea, reaching to no one, reaches this place. Here, I have said I will go deep within my body— and there I have found: wind, years full of whispers, language grasped less and less by distance, meaning whose light has ceased to revolve. You who taught me to place at one end of existence a great sorrow and at the other a blank field of soul, I am innocent. Whether or not we are the exchange between black and everlasting, we are duration—surely, even the sun has transparency, love, and eyelashes as it pronounces dawn, gathers where mountains divide, looks white in the eye. Brown hills, abandoned chapel, small children asleep, I don’t mean movement in a specific direction. I mean only the same bright pulses that sustain the impossible spaces within us where dew and fire meet. Mary Katherine Foster studied Literature, Creative Writing, and Leadership Theory at Birmingham-Southern College and recently graduated cum laude as a member of Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A.